Stanford Security Seminar

Vitaly Shmatikov

Perceptual, "context-aware" applications that observe their surroundings and interact with users via cameras and other sensors are becoming ubiquitous on personal computers, mobile phones, gaming platforms, household robots, and augmented-reality devices. Their ability to collect fine-grained images of their environment raises unique, interesting privacy risks for their users.

This talk will describe the design and implementation of Darkly, a practical privacy protection system for the increasingly common scenario where an untrusted, third-party perceptual application is running on a trusted device. Darkly is seamlessly integrated with OpenCV, a popular computer vision library used by such applications to access perceptual inputs. It deploys multiple privacy protection mechanisms including access control, algorithmic privacy transforms, and user audit.